This comment has all the wisdom of Gandalf and all the sassiness of a cat locking eyes with you before knocking stuff off a table. I entirely approve of this message.
Ditto. I don’t dwell and worry unproductively, but I worry less. I know I’ve done what I need to do by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, so if anything bad happens, it’s not like... some personal failing or me not taking things seriously. It’s really incredibly helpful. You can actually let go of the worry if you can honestly say you did wat you should, and that’s really all you should ask of anyone, even yourself. Like my mom says, if you’re half as kind to yourself as you are to others, getting along with your thoughts will be much easier for all the long years of your life. No one wants a vindictive backseat driver.
Once, the cover page of a newspaper had only good news. As I usually did, in the morning, on the bus to work, I only read the front page and That day I was happier, I wanted to do more things, help others. Just later that day, when I was reading the rest of the newspaper was that I realized the cover page, was not the real cover page but an ad from a bank. Anyway, that ad made my day!
Unless you can go out and make a difference yourself, don't pay too much mind to the news. That will only hinder your ability to become powerful enough to actually make change in the future. I'm NOT religious but the serenity prayer rings true here: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
The negative news isn't what I have a huge problem with. It's the fabricated rage. It's the taking of limited information, and twisting it into a rancor inducing article designed, not to inform, but to pit people against each other. THOSE are the article that should be railed against. We need to come together as a people because many publications are profiting in us doing the opposite.
Exactly, when it's clearly biased and meant to skew your perception to favor a specific point of view that would never hold up in a civil debate based on actual facts.. that is exactly the problem.
_But it’s just the mentally ill..._ Oh rly? Let’s see what the psychiatrists have to say “APA 2019 Main Stage: Gun Violence American Psychological Association” ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0ogtbdbHiII.html If you like that video check out my copy/paste comment below filled with fun stats about the USA I’ve been posting ever since the “Make America Great Again” government shut down at the beginning of the year. The thing is just as George Carlin said these sick in the head cowboy Orwellian world political and business leaders don’t care about anything. They have teams of analysts that use Game Theory strategy, probability science, political science, etc. telling them what is the best course of action. They know what works even more than the voters do yet they use this science to corrupt us even more into voting for them. ‘Cringe culture” isn’t new, people have been using outrage to exploit people into doing shitty things since the beginning of human history. I wish the world would take mind pollution/mental health as seriously as it takes environmental pollution.
I'm studying psychology at university and we just recently covered attention. What I thought was interesting is the "weapon focus effect" in which a threatening stimulus is likely to hold a persons attention. This explains why people can get information wrong about a traumatic event but usually they have a very accurate memory of the weapon.
That’s both catchy and true. I’m in the middle of family health stuff; it might be good to keep that mentally tucked away for some black humor at one point. Thanks.
Is this why some people complain that wholesome or positive news isn’t “real” news? I’ve always wondered why some people get really agitated if news channels focus on something more lighthearted every once in a while. 🤔
Well, I think it’s an importance thing. If I’m spending half an hour a day on news, I want what impacts me, my family, our economic security and bodily safety. At some level I NEED to know these things. If good things of import are being done, new medications that can provide solid treatment or even a cure for an illness, a new way to fund under-funded projects that improve the city, state, country, world, or if there’s a new way I personally Can effect change in my community for the better, I want to know that. But a lot of happy stories are not ranked as important because if they tackle danger, they are focusing after the fact when no one is at risk, and it’s usually not tied to any risk for other people, more likely a freak accident. The wedding stories and the social pillars having milestones is heartwarming, yeah, but again, less important. If I’m watching or reading news, I really want to be optimizing my time. While there’s a lot of news that grasps at straws for the sensational and is less important and helpful because of it, that doesn’t mean the less important fluffy stories and garbage crisis stories are a wash. There are more bad news stories in general, so of the entire news pie, there’s more benefit (for my purposes of news consumption) to watching and reading negative stories than happy ones, if I’m to walk away feeling I got the most important information I could with the limited time I had. So... I guess it depends on why people watch and read the news. There’s a big place for less-world-suck stories, to remind us we can cause change and be part of a solution, and I’m not at all knocking that. But you have to wade through fluff to get to that, and I can only take so much of the saccharine before I, frankly, need a break.
Lack of objectivity in negative reporting can make it terribly difficult to function at all for some people, let alone try to fix the problems. Presentation can be important when it comes to being aware of bad things.
Posts sad content on ig: Makes viewers feel sad Posts happy content on ig: Makes viewers feel sad b/c they’re not as happy **Insert bad luck Brian meme here**
I assumed it was because the average viewer compares the bad news to their life. Their life is more positive than the negative news, giving a sense of superiority and safety.
For me, I watch news to kind of make sure I’m prepared in life. I tend to worry and I realized years ago if I just... take steps that are reasonable and responsible as I go, if something bad happens, I shouldn’t blame myself; I wouldn’t blame someone else who had done everything they should have done, so why best myself up over it? I want to make sure I make informed decisions (or as close to as possible) and know what’s up in the world, especially so I understand the backstory if something comes up that is big and could hurt my family and me. I feel like burying my head in the sand and ignoring news (like I want to) just makes me more susceptible to whatever narrative gets spun, so it’s due diligence. I don’t like sensational bad news stories that grasp at straws and want mainly to shock and outrage. I don’t like puff pieces that have nothing to do with me or any kind of... wider implication. Milestones of the rich, famous, and influential are not important to me. Heartwarming stories about someone surviving a freak accident probably won’t help me, statistically. But as there’s more negative spin stories than positive fluff, those categories don’t cancel each other out. There are positive stories I like because they remind me that we have agency and can be part of a positive change, especially if it’s actual news to me and helps me find a new way I can help. But those are just way less common and I have to swim through all the fluff to get to those stories. Not usually a good bet if I only consume news thirty minutes a day. It’s more useful for me to use my time focusing on the stories I find important, and statistically it’s going to be negative stories every time. We instinctively search for threats. See a wedding photo and a burning residential building kinda like yours, or unfolding situation in a war you have friends in, YEAH you’re going to focus on that more. I don’t disagree with the findings in the video at all and I understand them. But I just... I don’t know. It seemed like it was partially the train wreck reaction of watching the destruction or even enjoying it somehow. I don’t know about the average news watcher. But... I don’t really like doing it. I would love if I could not watch it and get briefed by other more informed people I trust in my family circle, but they can’t stomach it. I’m kind of... it for my family in keeping us informed. I may have to take heartburn meds after encountering too much of the disturbing stuff, but... I don’t feel like I really have an alternative.
Yeah, I kind of dislike that summation of it. I’m driven by self-preservation when I get informed. I need to know what’s up for me and my family. It’s frustrating. Maybe I’m not the typical news consumer I thought I was? Which feels kinda ego-centric. But if the norm is “liking,” it, I’m not the norm. I don’t go for bad news, but important news, and there’s a lot of fluff in the positive story section. By default, I consume more negative stories. It’s like a math equation. 🤷🏻♀️ Maybe they framed it as “like” to get more attention from people being argumentative to the supposition, like me. 😂
I'm always hooked up to news about Bolsonaro doing something dictatorial and stupid because I view positively that his rule might come to an end sooner.
I had a period when I read economic depression porn during the financial crisis/Eurocrisis, but now after it do I see a pattern and realize that I am happier if I don't follow the news and I don't overreact to small events if I focus on the bigger picture. Pessimism is better than optimisim in many ways, and makes you prepared for tomorrow and you avoid taking stupid risk due to over-optimism. But best of all is to be a realist. Then you don't make stupid mistakes like optimists, and you don't act overly cautious and miss out of great oppurtunities.
Media outlet: I have some good news and some bad news. Media consumer: Tell me the bad news first. Media outlet: The bad news is... ... there is no good news!
Or, there is good news, but let’s focus on celebrity weddings and people narrowly avoiding death from freak accidents that, while interesting, aren’t helpful or relevant. Just a dash of actual good news about progress and general improvement of human life. This way, we have good news, but people don’t prioritize it because mostly it’s not important, so we can cut down how much good news we put out, because people don’t read it! More doom and gloom! Because they “wanted,” it!
I think a big thing to consider is that for the most part ... 'good news' is often just fluff or not news at least as protrayed by the news. For example, good news 1. person x has happy thing happen to them. This is a very common 'feel good' story and its just empty like its good for them but not important to the world, and you get this with sad things too but usually its more relatable or there is a reason for it since there is already enough bad news. News 2. Statistically things a better than they were X years ago. This isn't news because its not new (unless its a study) and also no one can ever feel this I don't know what a 50% drop in crime feels like because I only know what the now is like thats the problem with humans getting used to things we lose the perspective we may have once had.
I think the truly difficult things we'll have the most trouble dealing with are those that we're not talking/worried about now. In a weird sense, worrying about something means you'll likely do something about it which solves it. A problem which you don't recognise as one, on the other hand...
"Everyone loves a train wreck...till it crashes into them, then they cry and ask why could this happen again. Its like no one seems to notice that you get what you want, so better be careful what you ask for 'cause you might not like the response"
I have a question not regarding this video. But the term "conquering our fear" or rather the ability to. What type of process happens biologically when we conquer our fears?
Memories are stored in our brains with emotions attached to them. Every time we recall a memory, though, we're actually reading it, then writing back with new information from our current experience. The more we experience the same thing with less threat, the milder the emotions attached to the memories become. This is why there's a therapy for PTSD that involves giving the patient tranquilizers and then having them recall/relive their traumatic experiences. The meds reduce the fear response so that the memory gets rewritten with a milder emotion after every session, until it's manageable.
@Kisra David Um... no? I didn't say send them back to fight anyone or have any violence. Exposure doesn't have to mean literally re-enacting violence or danger. In fact, that would be the opposite of what I said the therapy is. The point is to expose them to a *SAFE* version of the thing -- often just being asked to remember the details of the event while sitting in a harmless therapist's office -- so the memory can be slowly overwritten with less danger-related emotions attached to it.
i must be an outlier, because i for one actively avoid bad news because i'm an emotional sponge and i just absorb everyone's sadness. bad news actually makes me depressed and just not want to be a part of society most of the time. ever since i started avoiding it, my outlook on life improved drastically. it didn't happen overnight (avoiding bad news is actually difficult), but you just learn to be willfully ignorant for the sake of your own mental well-being (particularly about bad news that you honestly can do nothing to alleviate or mitigate). within reason, of course; i'm not going to ignore or avoid the potential terrorist threat that could impact me and my loved ones, for example.
@@herrschmidt5477 lol. the internet has funny people. what i wrote was written in response to the video: that i avoid bad news unless it has the potential to affect me and my loved ones. i used a terrorist attack as ONE example. breathe. relax. don't read too much into things that were never aimed at you in the first place.
I think there is a large aspect of schadenfreude about it too. We enjoy hearing about bad things happening to others because we get to feel better about our own situation. Omg it’s so horrible over there, wow things don’t seem so bad over here now.
I feel like whatever Hank Green may accomplish in the future he will always be remembered for Sci Show. He could win a Nobel prize and people would still greet him on the street as "Hey you are the guy from SciShow"
0:01 - That's why Max Derrat started a Silver Lining series: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oC8dc7fmktU.html 0:33 - Yes, there is: humans are the worst. 😒 How many genocides alone have humans done? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-r2zEqDOwzW0.html 1:50 - Is he on the PTA? 🤔 If not, maybe he should join if he wants a say. Just don't jump out a window. 2:29 - She still won't split the bill. ¬_¬ 2:55 - That's hardly a surprise, it's just the Stroop effect. Did they account for word-length? 🤨
What I think is that people watch bad news because to protect them self in advance , if a paper says every thing is fine why would you read it . But if it's says there is some problem then you would read the whole news paper to find out what is wrong . For us it's just our Instinct and for news paper it's just there business 🙏🙏.
I think I prefer practical or relevant news vs "positive" or "negative". News that is more relevant to my general interests or are more practical to my life, I will pay more attention to, whether it's positive or negative.
Okay but how will the news story on my tiny country's national radio station about how 3 infants died at the same day from different reasons going to help me "protect myself"? I mean, yes, my country is tiny, but children die all the time! It's nothing new, so what makes these 3 infants so special that they're granted mention on national news?!?!?! It's like they ran out of stories and to fill the blank they call the hospitals to check who died today like anyone but the family/friends care... It's depressing! -___-'
This research also plays into how much more difficult it is for people think positively versus negatively; and why it takes so much more work to stay positive than to let the negativity drag you down.
I think using more complex and thorough language to describe "negative" emotions or situations is due to our need to justify our experience. No one wants to appear ungrateful so we give elaborate and detailed reasons as to why we're sad, angry, or frustrated because we desperately need those feelings to be validated.
Meanwhile, I'd love to have more media outlets use more neutral language in their headlines. I've had to stop reading The Atlantic because their headlines have been too emotionally loaded. Their pieces may have info I might want to know, but their headlines make me doubt the quality, reliability, and accuracy of their reporting these days.
I want to hear more about the science behind the last statement that staying exposed to negative news "helps us make the world a better place". Is this in a video already, if yes, please point me to it, if not then please make that video.
guys your videos are TOO LOUD !!! From all the videos from my playlist, yours always blast through the speakers ... I dont understand why RU-vid doesn't force some kind of equalization on the uploaded videos....
The proximity effect is weird too. A gruesome event, a plane crash maybe, is far more fascinating if it happened just down the road rather than on the other side of the country or the world.
4:39 Phew! I thought you were gonna omit that completely. *Obviously* paying more attention to something doesn't mean liking it. It's pretty much the opposite, it's because pain and danger distrub and threaten our state of relative calm and happiness that they get all of our attention. So that we can, you know, do something about it and then return to enjoying life. The problem with the media is that as individual, we don't have the power to change much about the majority of the topics, so we're just left with unproductive anxiety a feeling of powerlesness.
In addition, consider the instinctual desire to destroy. As in Sandor Grau booklet Ä Practitioners Guide to What Works..." It was also posited by Freud that we have a destructive instinct, as well as constructive, life-affirming instincts.
isn't it merely due to the fact that negative things need to be stopped, remedied, acted upon, whatever ? you can't respond if you're not aware. I do though feel overwhelmed with anxiety and anger lately in these crazy times. But my cure is foolproof : I've been watching the Dodo RU-vid channel animal rescue videos til I get that warm fuzzy feeling. muhaha, take that Trumpety Dump.
Steven Pinker's last couple books lay out the data that shows the world has been an upward trend for the last couple of hundred years. He makes it difficult to be a pessimist .
Social media is all about ego, that's why good news populate there, ego don't want ugly bad things around. News media is about others, we can accept we are good, others are bad.
With each passing day I question whether I'm a human just a little bit more. This time it's because I generally despise bad news almost as much as irrelevant news when apparently humans are supposed to like bad news and loads of people regularly consume irrelevant news.
So in other words, we have to make Boomers know that their social media precence is an active one, not a passive one and thus it's their responsibility to share and spread positivity just like they did in the '60s.
I usually avoid bad news and only watch/read it when I feel that I need to. I'll watch bad news and then avoid any other bad news for a few reports. So it'll go bad news about Amazon fire then 3 good news about kids/dogs/kindness.
Thank you for helping me not feel guilty about my interest in true crime, ( though I only watch two channels because they are respectful and donate proceeds to victim associations)
I prefer positive news. I mean really. My favourite political news channel is Turley Talks because he always have such an positive outlook on the world. And I like entertainment like watching an elephant in Indias zoo getting water in the hot summer heat and get filled with happiness. I love to laugh and get entertained after a harsh day at work.
I have an even more important question. At 5:35 how can you say "this episode of scishow psych" that quickly? When I try it it becomes a random mess of 'pspispisppisisp'... xD
So, why is it that we pay attention and kind of like bad news but not from people we know? (Regarding Hank saying we skip these people on the social media.)
Everything made sense until you said that the negative news helps us do something about it. I don’t see a lot of that. At least antidotally, people watch bad news and complain about it, rather than actually doing something.
It's not what you feel you know; it's what you know and the more you know; sales & marketing knows how to grab us; and never forget it's the other people who are stupid not you; take the time to look at the other side of the coin and you have more coins that are worth something.
It's not the news's fault for telling me how bad the world is. It's the world's fault for being that bad in the first place. If nothing bad happens in the world, the news would have nothing bad to report. I wish I lived in a better reality, where Trump never became president, where global warming isn't cooking our planet, where mass shootings don't happen, and where there aren't hurricanes, fires, etc. But I'm unfortunately stuck in this reality where those things do happen, and have no way out. :( There's only one reality to choose from, and it's a shitty one.
If you just ignore the upward trend in the quality of life for the average person, sure. Yeah the world isn't perfect, wanting it to be perfect is a fool's game. But it's improving.
